Brian Armstrong joins John Collison to talk about what’s happening behind the scenes at Coinbase: battling North Korean hackers, war stories from early scaling, confronting people who won’t use AI to code, Coinbase becoming people’s primary financial account, and why banks are now embracing crypto.

Full episode transcript on Substack

https://cheekypint.substack.com/p/coinbase-ceo-brian-armstrong-on-bitcoin

Timestamps

(00:00) Intro

(01:14) How Coinbase won the exchange market

(06:22) Losing money on every bitcoin purchase

(10:54) North Korean hackers

(14:54) The Everything Exchange

(17:39) Crypto will be bigger than gold

(19:22) Stablecoin adoption

(23:28) Jamie Dimon and big banks on crypto

(26:44) Coinbase as your primary financial account

(27:53) Neobanks

(29:41) Bitcoin going to $1 million

(33:16) Crypto in an investment portfolio

(34:43) GENIUS Act

(37:10) Electing a pro-crypto Congress

(45:24) Reforming accredited investor rules

(48:33) Squashing scams

(50:11) Bitcoin preserving the American experiment

(57:09) Balaji Srinivasan

(01:01:05) The mission-first company announcement

(01:05:50) How does Coinbase focus?

(01:07:44) Venture bets and Brian vetoing USDC

(01:12:02) Brian’s AI coding mandate

(01:15:13) Advice for Stripe